Orthodoxy, History, and Culture

Secularization, as we have seen, does not eclipse religion, but it transforms it. Faced with social processes that threaten to undermine their values, religions must choose between accommodation and resistance. In the case of Judaism, the Reform, and later Conservative and Reconstructionist movements, emerged as modes of accommodation. Each was schismatic in the sense that it involved changes that went beyond the traditional parameters of Jewish belief and practice. But none announced itself as revolutionary. On the contrary, each sought to identify itself as heir to the Jewish past. Each saw itself as a Jewish denomination. The paradox is that Judaism traditionally had no place for the concept of a denomination. Orthodoxy maintains that belief. The result is that liberal Judaisms and Orthodoxy are condemned to systematic mutual misunderstanding, a situation that leads to division without providing any shared language through which division might be transcended. Secularization proved destructive of Jewish unity while giving disunity a compelling momentum of its own.

What happened to Orthodoxy in the process? Thus far we have spoken of the various liberal non-Orthodoxies as accommodationist, perhaps seeming to imply that Orthodoxy, for its part, adopted a strategy of resistance. In fact, though, it was not uniformly so. There were a great variety of Orthodox responses. Some groups were opposed to and resisted the changes emancipation heralded. But others developed positive ideologies celebrating the new era. Yet others responded pragmatically, seeing no need to develop any ideological response to social change. Others again, while welcoming modernity, felt that the particular form it had taken in Europe would prove fatal for Jewish continuity and looked instead to a movement of renewal in Zion.

There was thus no single Orthodox strategy for confronting modernity. Instead there were strategies of every kind. This too is testimony to the fact that Orthodoxy is not a movement or denomination but a set of boundary principles within which lie a vast variety of culturally, intellectually, and spiritually distinguishable tendencies. In this chapter we consider Orthodox responses to emancipation and the collapse of the traditional structures of Jewish community. How did such a highly elaborated body of law and doctrine give rise to so diverse a range of reactions? Why did there emerge not one Orthodoxy but many?

CONSERVING THE COVENANT Traditionally, Judaism comprises laws and beliefs. All Orthodox responses to change hold one premiss in common: any social process that involved abandoning either an extant law or a central belief would have to be resisted. It was this that distinguished Orthodoxy from the other movements we have considered and led to its image as a mode of resistance.

This was Orthodoxy’s non-negotiable axiom. It was not a response to modernity as such, but instead a principled continuity that can be traced back to the origins of rabbinic Judaism and beyond. The covenant between God and Israel, of which the Mosaic books were the record and constitution, embodied a way of life represented by the commandments, along with a framework for the understanding of Jewish history. One of the central elements of the covenant was its own eternity, and the corresponding promise of the eternity of the people of Israel. Envisaging catastrophe and exile, Moses had communicated the divine promise, “Yet, even then, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them or spurn them so as to destroy them, annulling my covenant with them, for I am the Lord their God.”¹

footnotes: ¹ Lev. 26:44.

The eternity of the covenant was the eternity of the people. This gave Judaism its peculiar combination of resistance and impetus to change. The developments that took place in the transition from biblical to rabbinic Judaism, for example, were radical. The moves from Temple to synagogue, from sacrifice to prayer, from prophecy to the study of the Torah, from the rule of kings to that of sages, and other changes no less fundamental, transformed the character of Jewish life from one predicated on national institutions into one capable of survival in exile. But the logic of these changes was consistently to preserve the covenant in situations where some of its major institutions had been destroyed. The heirs to tradition in the nineteenth century inherited this combination of flexibility of form, conservatism of content. The image of Orthodoxy as resistant to change, an image it itself sometimes encourages, is true at one level, false at another. Its primary concern is to conserve the covenant, keeping faith with the past and discharging its duty to the future. Within this overall objective, institutional change is permitted; covenantal change is not.

This made some aspects of modern consciousness wholly unacceptable to Orthodoxy. Reform’s abandonment of the binding authority of halakhah was one. Conservative Judaism’s historicization² (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992). of the halakhic process was another. Reconstructionism’s removal of the category of revelation was a third. Each of these was a significant secularization of the concept of covenant, and none could be contemplated by even the most liberal of Orthodox thinkers. The notion of historical progress which so dominated the nineteenth century was profoundly at odds with the traditional Jewish idea of revelation, in which the past addressed the present and could not be superseded by it. Even the most enthusiastic of all Orthodox advocates of modernity, Samson Raphael Hirsch, made this principle clear. “We declare before heaven and earth,” he wrote in 1854, “that if our religion demanded that we should renounce what is called civilisation and progress we would obey unquestioningly, because our religion is for us truly religion, the word of God before which every other consideration has to give way.”³, trans. I. Grunfeld (2 vols.; London: Soncino, 1959), ii. 234–35.

footnotes: ² On this see Jonathan Sacks, Crisis and Covenant: Jewish Thought after the Holocaust ³ Samson Raphael Hirsch, “Religion Allied to Progress,” in Judaism Eternal

INTERPRETING CHANGE But not all issues were so straightforward, for two reasons. First, it was not always clear what constituted a continuation of the covenant. Were historical processes leading towards or away from a fulfilment of Jewish destiny? Second, what was the covenantal way of life? Was it that area bounded by halakhah, or did it extend beyond? Was Torah all-embracing, or were there areas of human experience that were religiously neutral? Since there was more than one possible answer to these questions, there was more than one possible Orthodox response to modernity.

Taking the first point first: social change required evaluation from the point of view of Jewish values. Was a new development in the situation of Jews covenantally sanctioned or not? An answer involved sophisticated historical judgement. It lay in the nature of the question that not all Orthodox thinkers concurred at any given moment, and there were times when a previous consensus was reversed.

The point is exemplified in the shifting history of Orthodox responses to the return to Zion. The Hamburg rabbinical court, as noted in the previous chapter, was severely critical of the programme of the reformers who had built the Hamburg temple. Among other innovations, they had deleted from the prayer book certain references to the ingathering of exiles and the restoration of Jewish life in Israel. The Orthodox response, published in 1819, condemned this as the abandonment of one of the fundamentals of Jewish faith. The return to Zion was affirmed by the traditional rabbinate as central to Jewish hope. One of the contributors to the volume, Rabbi Moses Sofer (1762–1839; known as the Chatam Sofer), was an enthusiastic supporter of Jewish settlement in Israel and was seen by some, in retrospect, as one of the early inspirations of the Zionist movement.⁴ (Jerusalem: Hasifriya Hatzionit, 1966), 364; S. Ehrmann, “Moses Sofer,” in Leo Jung (ed.), Jewish Leaders (New York: Bloch, 1953), 117–38.

footnotes: ⁴ See D. Zahavi, Mehachatam Sofer ad Herzl

In his reply to the reformers, Sofer had written dismissively of the benefits of European emancipation and longingly of his feelings for the land of Israel. “We do not need to eat the fruits and be sated with the goodness [of an easy and tranquil life among the nations. Were this so] one could then make the blasphemous claim, “Have we not found tranquillity and goodness among the Gentiles, so what need have we for the land of Israel?” Heaven forbid! We do not pour out our hearts and wait in anticipation all our days for an illusory material tranquillity. Rather our hope is to dwell in the presence of God there [in the land of Israel], the place designated for His service and for the observance of His Torah.”⁵, 154–55. There is the same mood here of yearning for Israel that we find in the writings of Judah Halevi and Nachmanides in the Middle Ages. Sofer was a passionate particularist, who saw the cultural force of Enlightenment universalism as antithetical to Jewish sensibilities and ultimately destructive of them. Far from heralding a new golden age for Jews, emancipation was a trial, tempting Jews through integration into assimilation.

footnotes: ⁵ Eleh Divrei Haberit

But a quite different attitude was possible within the same framework of Jewish values. In 1836, the young Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) published, under a pseudonym, an enthusiastic Orthodox response to emancipation. The Nineteen Letters were a guide to the perplexed of his time, and they argued that the new social and intellectual avenues open to Jews held the possibility of a renewal of Judaism. The impact of the work was dramatic. A young intellectual, Heinrich Graetz (1817–91), later to become nineteenth-century Jewry’s greatest historian, wrote on first reading it, “With avidity I devoured every word. Disloyal though I had been to the Talmud, this book reconciled me with it.”⁶ (Philadelphia: JPS, 1976), 71. He went to stay with Hirsch and studied under him for three years.

footnotes: ⁶ Quoted in Noah Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform

In the Nineteen Letters, Hirsch de-emphasized the Zionist dimension of Judaism. First, it was only a means, not an end. “The independent national life of Israel was never the essence or the purpose of our existence as a nation, but only a means of fulfilling our spiritual mission.”⁷, 107. Second, the ingathering of exiles was part of metaphysical, not political, history. “We hope and pray” for the messianic ingathering, “but actively to accelerate its coming is prohibited to us.”⁸ Third, even the rebirth of Israel will not be primarily a revival of Jewish nationhood, but the inauguration of an era of universal humanity when “hand in hand with us, the entire [human] race will be joined in universal brotherhood through the recognition of God.”⁹

footnotes: ⁷ Hirsch, Nineteen Letters ⁸ Ibid., 108. ⁹ Ibid.

These propositions are impeccably consistent with the same constellation of values which gave rise to Rabbi Sofer’s rejection of emancipation. But they point in a different direction. An open European society was for Hirsch not a temptation to be avoided but a challenge to be embraced. “It is our duty to join ourselves as closely as possible to the state which receives us into its midst, to promote its welfare and not to consider our own well-being as in any way separate from that of the state to which we belong.”¹⁰ Hirsch here means more than active citizenship and civic responsibility. He goes on to develop his own statement of the thesis that so dominated non-Orthodox Jewish thought of the early nineteenth century: the mission to the gentiles. “Picture every son of Israel a respected and influential priest of righteousness and love, disseminating among the nations not specific Judaism – for proselytism is forbidden – but pure humanity.”¹¹ Hitherto, their segregation and civil disabilities had prevented Jews from exercising this exemplary role. Emancipation now accorded Judaism “a greater opportunity for the fulfilment of its task, the realization of a noble and ideal life.”¹²

footnotes: ¹⁰ Ibid., 107. ¹¹ Ibid., 108. ¹² Ibid., 111.

Were these two approaches, Hirsch’s and Sofer’s, incompatible? No more and no less than those of Jeremiah and Ezekiel some two and a half thousand years earlier. Jeremiah had sent a letter to the exiles in Babylon advising them to “Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat their produce.... Seek the peace of the city to which I have exiled you. Pray to the Lord for it: for in its peace you will find peace.”¹³ Ezekiel had delivered a prophecy denouncing the exiles. “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world, who serve wood and stone.’ But what you have in mind will never happen.... I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered, with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath.”¹⁴ Jeremiah insists that exile must be endured; Ezekiel issues the reminder that exile is still exile, not home. Jeremiah warns against a premature forcing of history. Ezekiel warns against assimilation. Each was to be a significant proof-text in the history of Orthodox responses to Zionism. They are part of the same vision. They differ in what they judge to be the imperative of the hour.

footnotes: ¹³ Jer. 29:5. ¹⁴ Ezek. 20:32, 34.

DEVELOPMENTS AND VARIATIONS It would be anachronistic to describe Sofer as a Zionist, Hirsch as a non-Zionist. At that time, in the early nineteenth century, the Zionist movement existed neither in fact nor in imagination. A massive leap of thought had to take place before the traditional Jewish longing for a return to the land could be translated from prayer to political programme. At most there was a difference of emphasis between the two men. Sofer, like many other rabbis of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,¹⁵ expressed his love of the land of Israel in terms of support for Orthodox Jewish settlements there. Hirsch, as a defender of Orthodoxy in a rapidly acculturating German Jewry, stressed diaspora Jewish patriotism and universality. There is in his writings a barely veiled apologetic motif. But as the century progressed, what had been no more than a mild difference became markedly more pronounced.

footnotes: ¹⁵ In the 18th cent. these included Elijah the Gaon of Vilna, and various Hasidic leaders, including Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, Abraham of Kalisk, and Nachman of Bratslav. In the 19th cent. they included Rabbis Elijah Guttmacher, Azriel Hildesheimer, and Jacob Ettlinger.

The particularism implicit in Rabbi Moses Sofer was taken further by Zvi Hirsch Kalischer (1795–1874) and Yehudah Alkalai (1798–1878), two Orthodox rabbis who argued that the process of redemption must begin with human efforts to resettle the land of Israel.¹⁶, 101–14; Jacob Katz, Jewish Emancipation and Self-Emancipation (Philadelphia: JPS, 1986), 89–115, 153–66. The work of Kalischer in particular struck a chord with a secularist Jew and one-time colleague of Karl Marx, Moses Hess. Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) laid the basis for secular Zionism, and was an attack on emancipation and Reform as powerful as any delivered by Orthodoxy. Where Clermont-Tonerre had argued that Jews should be emancipated individually, not nationally, Hess argued that only national, not individual, emancipation was possible. He was savage in his critique of Jews who had “religionized” Judaism and de-emphasized its national component. The Jew who denies Jewish nationalism, he wrote, is “a traitor to his people and to his family.”¹⁷ [1862], trans. Maurice J. Bloom (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), 27. He was particularly critical of those who welcomed integration into European society and spoke as if “the dispersion of the Jews were the Mission of Judaism.”¹⁸

footnotes: ¹⁶ On Alkalai and Kalischer see Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea ¹⁷ Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem ¹⁸ Ibid., 58.

In the opposite direction, German Reform and Orthodox rabbis – the so-called Protestrabbiner – were to come together in a rare demonstration of solidarity to denounce the first Zionist Congress (1897) and to assert: “The efforts of the so-called Zionists to create a Jewish National State in Palestine are antagonistic to the messianic promises of Judaism.”¹⁹, 427–29. The rabbis hinted ominously that political Zionism conflicted with the loyalty of German Jews to their country. Herzl, under pressure, had to transfer the congress from Munich to Basle.

footnotes: ¹⁹ In Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World

Zionism had thus brought one group of Orthodox Jews – mainly East European – into a temporary kinship with secularists, and another – mostly from Western Europe – into a momentary alliance with Reform. The shifts and ironies were to continue. Almost all the children and grandchildren of the anti-Zionist Protestrabbiner eventually settled in Israel.²⁰ (Jerusalem: Keter, 1972), xiii. 1255. East and West European Orthodoxy, divided between the influences of Sofer and Hirsch, eventually converged in the non-Zionist Agudat Yisrael (1912). Rabbi Solomon Breuer, a student of Moses Sofer’s son, Abraham, and son-in-law and successor of Hirsch,²¹, 115–26. symbolized this new consensus, and took an active part in Agudat Yisrael. Zionism was variously to be conceived by Orthodoxy as satanic (Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum), messianic (Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook), a pragmatic solution to persecution (Rabbi Isaac Reines), and the context of Judaic renewal (Isaac Breuer).

footnotes: ²⁰ See “Protestrabbiner,” Encyclopaedia Judaica ²¹ Schwab, The History of Orthodox Jewry in Germany

Each of these attitudes was possible within the same highly articulated rabbinic tradition. All parties agreed, in other words, that the present condition of Jews was to be characterized as galut, exile; that their desire was for the messianic age; and that the messianic age would witness a return of Jews to Zion. All agreed that neither Jewish dispersion nor Jewish nationhood was an end in itself. All, too, agreed that Jewish history was not secular, made entirely by man. It was providential, shaped by God. All Orthodox thinkers therefore parted company with the most basic premisses of Reform on the one hand and secular Zionism on the other. But despite this considerable area of substantive agreement, incompatible positions and sometimes violent conflict were possible. Every shade and nuance of diversity to be found outside Orthodoxy was mirrored within Orthodoxy itself, translated, to be sure, into different frames of reference.

The example of Zionism illustrates a fundamental point about Orthodoxy, or more precisely, about Torah. The application of Torah to new social, historical, or political circumstance always involves a social or historical or political judgement. The covenantal imperative is never self-evident, never the direct application of text to situation. Before a situation can be judged, it must first be characterized. Which of two alternative futures – individual emancipation in Europe or collective emancipation in Israel – was the next step in history to which Jews were being called? Which was more threatening to Jewish integrity: assimilation into non-Jewish society or the secularization of a Jewish state? How was one to view political action to bring about Jewish sovereignty in Israel? Pragmatically or theologically? If pragmatically, would it worsen or improve the situation of Europe’s Jews? If theologically, was it a response to Providence or an attempt to frustrate it?

Orthodoxy acts to conserve the covenant, to write the next chapter in a continuous narrative whose beginning and end are both revealed in the Torah. But what that next chapter is involves sensitive judgement, both of Torah and of the contemporary situation. Judgement is not the deductive inference of conclusions from premisses, but the weighing of alternatives and a search for analogies, none of which is precise. It admits of more than one right answer. This is the first reason for Orthodox diversity.

TORAH AS CODE OR CULTURE One question which modernity posed was thus the direction of covenantal history. A second was the scope of covenantal existence.

As noted in the previous chapter, secularization involves the transference of religious values from the public to the private domain. In the case of Judaism, the change involved was sudden and substantial. Prior to emancipation, Jews had lived within an integrated and enveloping Jewish culture. To be sure, trade and geographical proximity brought them into contact with non-Jews. At no stage were Jewish ideas and practice hermetically sealed from the surrounding popular or high culture. But education, adult study, and the economic, welfare, and judicial institutions of communal life were administered by the Jewish community itself. Jews lived together and formed an autonomous reference-group with its own distinctive values. To be a Jew was to be born into a coherent culture which embraced far more than religious law and teaching. Jewish identity was for the most part unproblematic: we find no soul-searching on this point prior to modernity. Jewish self-hood was essential, not adjectival.

The transition from Jew to Jewish German, Frenchman, or Englishman was profound. Jews in Germany were called on, and summoned themselves, to drop Yiddish or Judendeutsch and learn pure German. Jewish children were to be given a secular education. A common assumption of Jewish and non-Jewish liberals of the Enlightenment was that the culture of the ghetto was anachronistic and unrefined. It stood in the way of social acceptance. Great emphasis was placed on new kinds of school that would provide Jews with Bildung and Sittlichkeit, education in character and respectability. Jewish periodicals like Sulamith and Hame’asef delivered homilies on the need for culture and rectitude.²²; George L. Mosse, “Jewish Emancipation: Between Bildung and Respectability,” in Jehuda Reinharz and Walter Schatzberg (eds.), The Jewish Response to German Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), 1–16. Jews passed through the trauma of what John Murray Cuddihy has called “the ordeal of civility.”²³.

footnotes: ²² See Katz, Out of the Ghetto ²³ Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility

Culturally, intellectually, and socially, the Jewish reference-group was, for the first time, the majority non-Jewish society. This was made possible by the secularization of the public domain. No longer did Jews confront a Christian or Islamic state. It was a neutral, or, as Jacob Katz has termed it, a semi-neutral society, for old hostilities remained. Some Jews converted, especially among the higher economic and intellectual strata. Heinrich Heine called the baptismal certificate “the ticket of admission to Western culture.” But for the most part Jews pursued, in the public arena, a religionless universality. Indeed, Jewish intellectuals displayed an almost religious fervour for secularism. Thinkers of Jewish ancestry were some of the most powerful iconoclasts of the modern world, among them Marx, Durkheim, and Freud.

What, then, remained of Judaism? Precisely that: Judaism. The word itself is a symptom of modernity, no less than the word “Orthodox.” “Judaism” signifies a religion in the peculiarly modern sense, a personal set of convictions acted out for the most part in private contexts. “The conception of Judaism as an organized body of doctrine...derives from an age in which people had determined that Judaism belonged to the category of religion.... The source of the categorical power of “Judaism” derives from the Protestant philosophical heritage that has defined scholarship, including category-formation, from the time of Kant onward.”²⁴ (New York: Hunter College, 1986), 4–5. The environing culture of traditional Jewish societies could not be expressed by a word as narrow in its compass as “Judaism.” The question was therefore: Could Torah as hitherto conceived survive within this circumscribed space, as Judaism?

footnotes: ²⁴ Jacob Neusner, From “Judaism” to “Torah”: An Essay in Inductive Category Formation

The early reformers answered the question in the negative. Only an abridged Torah could survive, one that had been pruned of its segregating beliefs and prohibitions. It was Samson Raphael Hirsch’s genius to see that an affirmative answer could be given. Precisely because Jewish entry into German society was a question, not of religion but of culture – derekh eretz, as he called it – emancipation was religiously neutral and could be undergone without a single compromise of halakhah. Hirsch called his symbiosis of secular culture and Jewish religiosity Mensch-Jissroel, or Man-Israel. Adopting a phrase from the Mishnah which had originally meant “Torah combined with a worldly occupation,” he called his programme *torah im derekh eretz.*²⁵ in this context. That had been done earlier by Naftali Herz Wessely in his tract on enlightened Jewish education, Divrei Shalom Ve’emet (Berlin, 1782). In Hirsch’s usage the phrase now evoked a rich set of associations: Torah together with civility, secular culture, and exemplary citizenship.

footnotes: ²⁵ Mish. Avot 2:2. Hirsch was not the first to use the phrase torah im derekh eretz

In his early career, as a young rabbi in Oldenburg, Hirsch was something of a radical, preaching sermons in high literary German, wearing canonicals, introducing a choir into the synagogue, and abolishing the Kol Nidrei prayer on Yom Kippur. These were all innovations later to be regarded, especially by the Hungarian Orthodox rabbinate, as symptoms of Reform. Hirsch, of course, was in no way a reformer: of his generation, he was the most ardent and successful polemicist against Reform. His importation into the synagogue of non-Jewish models of decorum had already become the norm in the Orthodox establishments of countries such as England and France, where the process of emancipation was more advanced.²⁶ (Oxford: Transaction Books, 1987), 159–70, 225–46. Hirsch was merely demonstrating that the “ordeal of civility” required only cosmetic changes. It was a matter not of substance but of style. Reform could be successfully confronted on its own ground – cultural accommodation – without any sacrifice of principle or practice.

footnotes: ²⁶ For comparisons between the English and French Jewish adjustment to modernity and the German experience see Michael Graetz, “The History of an Estrangement between Two Jewish Communities: German and French Jewry during the Nineteenth Century,” and Todd Endelman, “The Englishness of Jewish Modernity in England,” both in Jacob Katz (ed.), Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model

DUAL SENSIBILITIES But Hirsch’s substantive achievement did not so much lie in synagogue life as in education. It was here that torah im derekh eretz offered the possibility of a genuinely creative synthesis. It brought together two strong currents: the traditional Jewish reverence for study, and the early nineteenth-century German preoccupation with educational philosophy. Hirsch was deeply critical of the Jewish education of his day, divided as it was between highly secularized schools such as the Philantropin in Frankfurt, and the traditional chadarim (Hebrew schools) which had offered no response to new economic and cultural challenges. The former were technically proficient in training young people for careers but were cursory in their treatment of Judaism and in what Hirsch called “the education of the heart.”²⁷, 115 The latter taught “uncomprehended Judaism as a mechanical habit... without its spirit.”²⁸ Evidently Hirsch’s parents took the same view, for they sent their son to the local non-Jewish grammar school in Hamburg in preference to the several available Jewish schools.²⁹, 53–56. The way was open for a new kind of Jewish day school, one that would combine secular excellence with rigorous Torah study; and in 1853, as the newly appointed rabbi in Frankfurt, Hirsch created it.

footnotes: ²⁷ Hirsch, Nineteen Letters ²⁸ Ibid., 126. ²⁹ See Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform

Hirsch’s educational philosophy has been characterized as one of compartmentalization. The “with” of “Torah with derekh eretz” suggested dualism rather than dialogue. Torah and secular knowledge, on this view, “can co-operate, even as the limbs of a body co-operate and co-ordinate; but they cannot interact and speak to each other, even as a sane and balanced person does not talk to himself.”³⁰ (New York: Ktav, 1971), 71. Hirsch himself certainly aspired to something larger. He believed that Jewish spirituality had atrophied in the ghetto. Cut off from general culture, “every mind that felt the desire for independent activity was obliged to forsake the paths of study and research open in general to the human intellect and to take recourse in dialectical subtleties and hair-splittings.”³¹, 121. Hirsch felt that the emancipation of Jews would be the emancipation of Torah and its re-engagement with the real world. This would in turn inform the way a Jew studied secular disciplines. “Nature should be contemplated with the spirit of David; history should be perceived with the ear of an Isaiah.”³² Hirsch believed in synthesis and in the essential harmony of all knowledge. “It is the Jewish view that truth, like God its source, is one and indivisible, and that therefore knowledge of it can be only one and indivisible.”³³, i. 207–8. History reveals Providence; science discloses Creation. Secular education, quite apart from training for a career and livelihood, “contributes greatly at the same time to deepening and broadening Jewish religious education.”³⁴

footnotes: ³⁰ Norman Lamm, “Two Versions of Synthesis,” in Faith and Doubt ³¹ Hirsch, Nineteen Letters ³² Ibid., 127–28. ³³ Hirsch, Judaism Eternal ³⁴ Ibid., 209.

By and large, the synthesis did not happen. The fault lay in neither Hirsch nor his ideals, but in the social context.³⁵ synthesis be achieved?’ might have had a different answer” (Judith Bleich, personal communication). The very secularization of European culture, which allowed Jews to participate in it, frustrated attempts to Judaize it. If the products of Hirsch’s school were compartmentalized, it was because the wider society of which they were a part produced compartmentalized identities. In response to the large, faceless, and value-neutral structures of corporate and bureaucratic life has come “the creation of the private sphere as a distinctive and largely segregated sector of social life, along with the dichotomization of the individual’s societal involvements between the private and public spheres.... A specific private identity provides shelter from the threats of anonymity.”³⁶, 166–67. The nineteenth-century aphorism that one should be “A man in the street and a Jew at home” deserves to be seen as part of a universal process – the disjunction between private identities and public roles – and not a specifically Jewish one.

footnotes: ³⁵ To my sociological interpretation, Professor Judith Bleich adds another explanation: “One of the major deficiencies of Hirsch’s school system appears to have been the lack of an intensive higher-level Judaic Studies curriculum. Had this been instituted, the question ‘Can a torah im derekh eretz ³⁶ Berger, Berger, and Kellner, The Homeless Mind

It may therefore be that what Hirsch might have regarded as his greatest failure was, in fact, his greatest success: the creation of the compartmentalized Jew. Charles Liebman has pointed out that while compartmentalization is philosophically unsatisfying and possibly indefensible, it is an extraordinarily successful survival strategy. He argues that “most Orthodox Jews have retained their ritual tradition and belief system virtually intact and at the same time have acculturated in language, dress and education to American styles because they have been able to separate these two aspects of life so that they impinge on one another as little as possible.”³⁷

footnotes: ³⁷ Charles Liebman, “Orthodox Judaism Today,” 116.

In his reflections on Hirsch’s school, Jacob Rosenheim noted that its success in producing religious commitment was not due to the school itself, its curriculum, or its methodology, but to its close links with Hirsch’s synagogue and the Frankfurt community. Those who remained within the community stayed Orthodox; those who left Frankfurt tended not to. A recent study of Frankfurt Jewry concluded that “the long-term effectiveness of the school in educating its pupils depended on the success and strength of the community itself.”³⁸ (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 154.

footnotes: ³⁸ Robert Liberies, Religious Conflict in Social Context: The Resurgence of Orthodox Judaism in Frankfurt am Main 1838–1877

Hirsch had thus found one way of solving the dilemma of modern Jewish identity. It lay not so much in his philosophy as in its institutional and social reality. There were two domains: the secular, public world and the private, Jewish world. The former, being secularized, was halakhically neutral. It was the territory of neither the commanded nor the prohibited, but of the permitted. In this area, Jews might pursue careers, acquire cultural depth, and be active shapers of society while at the same time meticulously avoiding transgression of Jewish law. The latter was where a Jew became and remained a Jew. To maintain an identity on so slender a base required a strong and disciplined community in which synagogue, school, and adult study all reinforced one another. The two worlds did not connect. Hirsch wished they would. Sociological reality dictated otherwise. But the strength of the Frankfurt community meant that Hirsch’s most basic concern was met: Torah would have priority over derekh eretz – or as we might otherwise put it, secular activity was what one did, Jewishness was what one was.

Hirsch’s solution came to be known as Neo-Orthodoxy. The description is not altogether apt. It was not Modern Orthodoxy in the sense which came to be attached to the phrase in America in the 1960s. Hirsch was and saw himself as a traditionalist rather than a modernist. His enthusiasm for emancipation lay in the fact that he saw in it the opportunity for a return to a richer version of tradition than had been possible in the narrow centuries following the Spanish expulsion. But he was, none the less, conscious of living at a time of massive social change, and believed that Judaism should meet the challenge directly rather than cling to the manners and mores of the ghetto. He recognized, de facto, that Jewish institutions and culture no longer comprised the totality of life for the modern Jew. Jewish juridical autonomy had ceased. Much of Judaism’s civil law had become inoperative. Jews were part of a wider culture. The few specifically Jewish contexts that remained were the “four cubits” of family, synagogue, school, and the fellowship of study. Jewish experience had contracted to fit the space available for it. It had become “Judaism.”³⁹ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 147–64.

footnotes: ³⁹ See Charles Liebman, “Religion and the Chaos of Modernity: The Case of Contemporary Judaism,” in Jacob Neusner (ed.), Take Judaism, for Example

DEREKH ERETZ: JEWISH OR SECULAR? It was here that a critical argument emerged over the phrase derekh eretz. At all periods, rabbinic Judaism had recognized a domain outside Torah but essential to it. In the Mishnah in which the phrase torah im derekh eretz originally appeared, it meant an occupation, a means of earning a living. Elsewhere it carried a spectrum of senses: good manners and etiquette, practical wisdom, or civilized or socially constructive behaviour.⁴⁰ (Jerusalem, 1947– ), vii. 672–706. Derekh eretz bore roughly the same relationship to rabbinic Judaism as did the Wisdom literature, such as the book of Proverbs, to biblical Judaism.

footnotes: ⁴⁰ “Derekh Eretz,” in Entziklopediah Talmudit

Hirsch saw that whereas Torah was constitutive of Judaism, *derekh eretz – “*the way of the world” – was not. The particular social, economic, and cultural forms of the ghetto belonged to one phase of Jewish history. They did not belong to the core of Jewish identity. Hirsch drew a clear distinction between matters of halakhah – the commanded and forbidden – and matters of custom, habit, folklore, and convention. Torah im derekh eretz meant that Torah could be combined with selective elements of any culture in which Jews were located, provided that it involved no breach of a command or prohibition. Just as Jews dressed differently in different times and places and spoke different languages, so they could now acquire European mores while leaving the essential core of Torah untouched.

Others, though, saw emancipation quite differently. In the Mishnah and Talmud, Jewish-gentile relationships had been subsumed under the tractate Avodah Zarah, the tractate dealing with idolatry. Throughout the Middle Ages, Jews for the most part confronted a Christian or Islamic society. A vast ideological chasm, in other words, separated them from their neighbours. To identify fully with the host culture meant apostasy. That which flowed from the outside as derekh eretz was necessarily marginal. With emancipation, the scope and impact of derekh eretz were dramatically increased, and threatened instead to marginalize Judaism. Samuel Heilman has gone so far as to suggest that the new social order was “a new version of the age-old Christian efforts to convert Jews. Now instead of demanding a conversion to Christianity, the Christians were demanding a Jewish conversion to secular citizenship.”⁴¹

footnotes: ⁴¹ Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy,” 23–24.

There were those who concluded that Torah, though it was still to be accompanied by derekh eretz, needed a specifically Jewish derekh eretz. The culture of the ghetto might have been, in its time, halakhically neutral, but it now took on a new significance. It was an essential bearer of tradition and continuity. No change could be regarded as merely cosmetic. The abandonment of Yiddish in favour of the vernacular, the application to the synagogue of non-Jewish models of decorum and refinement, and the pursuit of a general education were concessions to an intrusive secularity. Hirsch’s programme was a Trojan horse. The point was made in the twentieth century by a Jewish secularist, Gershom Scholem. Torah im derekh eretz, he argued, became “a vehicle of a kind of assimilation whose demonic triumphs in the Orthodox camp would require a Jewish Balzac to describe them in their full extent.” It was intended “to strengthen the Jewish backbone of the pious.” Instead it “has done more than anything else to break it.”⁴², 354–55. This perception had been registered at the very beginning of the nineteenth century. Its chief proponent was Rabbi Moses Sofer.

footnotes: ⁴² Quoted in Rosenbloom, Tradition in an Age of Reform

Sofer, the architect of Hungarian Orthodoxy, applied to every accommodation to modernity the maxim chadash asur min hatorah, “the new is biblically forbidden.” This was a pun based on a statement in the Mishnah⁴³ relating to the prohibition against eating produce from the new harvest prior to the bringing of the Omer offering. In Sofer’s homiletical usage it now expressed an opposition to any innovation in Jewish life, especially within the twin sanctuaries of the synagogue and school.

footnotes: ⁴³ Mish. Orlah 3:9.

In retrospect we can understand the logic of this position. The rabbis of the mishnaic and talmudic periods had seen as part of their mandate not merely the direct enforcement of biblical law but also its indirect protection. According to the Mishnah at the beginning of tractate Avot, the Men of the Great Assembly had formulated the principle “Make a fence for the Torah.”⁴⁴ The sages were accordingly empowered to enact decrees forbidding what was otherwise permitted on the grounds that certain acts, in themselves neutral, might eventually lead to transgressions of biblical law or other forms of social disintegration.⁴⁵, v. 529–40. This power had lapsed in the post-talmudic, or at least post-gaonic, period. None the less, the perception which underlay it was still germane. Not everything that was halakhically permissible was neutral from the broad perspective of halakhic continuity. On the contrary, minor aesthetic or educational changes today might lead tomorrow to substantive and unacceptable reforms. So the prehistory of the Reform movement showed.

footnotes: ⁴⁴ Mish. Avot 1:1. ⁴⁵ For a survey of the nature and scope of such decrees see Entziklopediah Talmudit

Rabbi Sofer’s perception seems to have been that in an age marked by flight from tradition, small deviations heralded major breaches. The new, if not in itself forbidden, would in the end lead to acts that were. It was a position taken further by the next generation of Hungarian halakhists, among them his son Rabbi Abraham Sofer, Moses Schick, and Judah Aszod. An ultra-traditionalism developed in Hungarian Orthodoxy which invested custom with emblematic significance as a fence around Jewish law. Continuity demanded not a new derekh eretz but the vigilant maintenance of the old. Judaism was a total way of life and therefore nothing – certainly not secular culture – could escape categorization into that which enhanced and that which endangered religious observance in the long run. The doors that Hirsch opened, Sofer and his disciples closed. Their objective was the same: the defence of Orthodoxy as a way of life. But their strategies were opposed. What was seen in Germany as a possible synthesis was seen in Hungary as an inescapable antithesis.

Sofer’s followers took a markedly negative view of secular culture. They therefore needed an institutional base quite different from Hirsch’s Frankfurt model of the torah im derekh eretz day school. It came in the form of the yeshiva. Rabbi Sofer founded his yeshiva in Pressburg and it quickly became the largest in Europe.⁴⁶ (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1967), 115–48. Its significance was immediately grasped by the Hungarian reformers, one of whom, Wolf Breisach, made a determined attempt to have it closed.⁴⁷, 107–58. Others flourished throughout Austro-Hungary, among them Eisenstadt, Huszt, and Satmar. They were particularly effective in training dedicated and learned alumni, many of whom subsequently occupied rabbinic positions. But the true home of the modern yeshiva proved to be Lithuania, where Volozhin, founded in 1803 by Rabbi Chayyim Volozhiner (1749–1821), quickly became the model which others sought to emulate.

footnotes: ⁴⁶ See Jacob Katz, “Contribution towards a Biography of R. Moses Sofer,” in Studies in Mysticism and Religion Presented to Gershom Scholem ⁴⁷ See Michael Silber, “The Historical Experience of German Jewry and Its Impact on the Haskalah and Reform in Hungary,” in Jacob Katz (ed.), Toward Modernity

The Lithuanian-style yeshiva differed from its predecessors in a number of ways. It was independent of the local community, both in its funding and in its student body. Students often came from a distance. During their stay, the yeshiva became a home and its head a figure of quasi-parental authority. No longer simply a place of Jewish instruction, the yeshiva became a bulwark against secularization. It was a total environment, the locus of a spiritual elite who would remain faithful to tradition while around them the Jewish world crumbled.

Throughout Eastern Europe during the nineteenth century, new yeshivot emerged. Mir, Slobodka, Telz, Kovno, and Ponevezh developed into leading centres. As in Pressburg, they faced fierce opposition from maskilim, enthusiasts of the Enlightenment, who described them as “nurseries of fanatical rabbis.” Determined attempts were made within the yeshivot to counteract the corrosive effects of secular culture, to which the students were not immune. A decision was taken, in 1892, to let Volozhin yeshiva be closed rather than accede to government insistence that it teach the Russian language and elementary general knowledge.⁴⁸, 2 (1990), 76–133. Some believed that traditional textual learning was no longer enough. Rabbi Israel Salanter developed a vigorous system of personal ethical discipline, musar, which eventually gained ground in the Lithuanian yeshivot. The yeshiva became the locus of a Jewish counter-culture. It was perceived by supporters and opponents alike as the last refuge of tradition as a total and indivisible way of life.

footnotes: ⁴⁸ See Jacob J. Schachter, “Haskalah, Secular Studies and the Close of the Yeshiva in Volozhin in 1892,” The Torah U-Madda Journal

PRINCIPLE AND POLICY As in the case of Zionism, the issue of Torah and secular culture was to undergo evolutions and ironies. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook developed a mystical synthesis that attempted to transcend the dichotomy as set out by the Hirsch and Sofer schools. Like Hirsch he believed that Judaism could and should embrace secular culture. Like the Chatam Sofer he believed that Judaism demanded a distinctively Jewish culture. The two propositions were incompatible only because of the terms of Jewish existence in an emancipating diaspora. Their resolution was to be found in Jewish national rebirth in the land of Israel. There, Jewish spirituality would undergo a renaissance, led by a new type of yeshiva that would combine Talmud with Jewish poetry, philosophy, and mysticism. Jewish culture as a whole would be transfigured and sanctified. Rabbi Kook celebrated the founding of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and delivered a warm address at the opening of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus. That which seemed secular was only apparently so. Once Torah radiated through Israel, it would reveal the essential harmony and holiness of all branches of human endeavour. He saw secular culture not as something to be studied, or avoided, but as something to be transformed.⁴⁹ (Jerusalem: WZO, 1974), 189–230; Eliezer Schweid, “Two Neo-Orthodox Responses to Secularisation,” Immanuel, 20 (1986), 107–17.

footnotes: ⁴⁹ On Kook and secular culture see Zvi Yaron, Mishnato shel Harav Kook

Meanwhile, Hirsch’s programme was in retreat among his own followers. His son-in-law, Solomon Breuer, student of Abraham Sofer, instituted a yeshiva on the Pressburg model in Frankfurt. Hirsch’s daughter intimated that her father had intended torah im derekh eretz as a model for German Jewry only.⁵⁰ Thus began a sustained revisionist reading of Hirsch which maintained that he had permitted secular studies only as a means to earning a livelihood or as a temporary concession to social crisis.⁵¹ (London: Jewish Post Publications, 1958); Immanuel Jakobovits, “Torah im Derekh Eretz Today,” L’Eylah, 20 (1985), 36–41. There was an equally dramatic move in the opposite direction. Rabbi Chayyim Soloveichik (of Brisk, 1853–1918) had been one of the great intellectual influences of East European traditionalism, as teacher and animating genius of the Volozhin yeshiva. His grandson, Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, became the dominant influence of American Modern Orthodoxy. Volozhin had rigorously excluded all secular disciplines. Two generations later, Joseph Soloveitchik brought to his expositions of Judaism an encyclopaedic mastery of Western philosophy, hermeneutics, theology, and theoretical physics. In his essay The Lonely Man of Faith (1965) he was to develop the most complete, if ultimately tragic, exposition of the modern Jew as a man divided between two sensibilities, the secular and the religious.

footnotes: ⁵⁰ See Heilman, “The Many Faces of Orthodoxy,” 42–51, and the sources cited there. ⁵¹ See I. Grunfeld, Three Generations

With Zionism, the question had been the evaluation of history. With torah im derekh eretz the question was the evaluation of culture. As before, there was much common ground. All agreed that Torah was primary, that its authority was non-negotiable, and that its lines traced the contours of Jewish identity. But how far did Torah extend? Did the “four cubits of halakhah” include, as Maimonides had said, all natural and human sciences,⁵², Intro. or did they exclude them? How far was secular culture neutral, or a positive aid to the understanding of Torah, or a negative force undermining it?⁵³ (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1990). How far was the traditional Jewish culture of the ghetto and shtetl accidental or essential to Jewish self-definition? These questions could not be answered by reference to Torah alone, for it was precisely the definition of Torah that was at stake. The key sources – which until now had been unproblematic – were revealed, on application to the new cultural circumstances, to be systematically ambiguous. The principle of torah im derekh eretz, if not the phrase itself, was subscribed to by all parties but given a different interpretation by each.

footnotes: ⁵² Berakhot 8a: “From the day the Temple was destroyed, the Holy One, blessed be He, has had nothing in His world except the four cubits of halakhah alone.” See Maimonides, Commentary on the Mishnah ⁵³ The argument is explored in detail in Norman Lamm, Torah Umadda

The issue was not only one of principle but also of policy. Which strategy would best conserve the covenant? As we have seen, shrewd sociological insight lay behind the success of Neo-Orthodoxy’s compartmentalization. Secularization is not a linear process. The tide of modernity does not sweep away every vestige of tradition in its path. Religious institutions can thrive in the semi-private spaces of synagogue, school, and family life; and it is here that identity is formed.

But behind the Chatam Sofer’s resistance to modernity lay an opposite but no less profound sociological assessment. Marion J. Levy has drawn attention to a general feature of the encounter between traditional societies and the modernization process. The acculturating avant-garde “see before them many and various results of the process” on which they are to embark, some benign, others destructive. They “are obsessed with the belief that they can take what they please and leave the rest.” This selective accommodation lies at the heart of the Neo-Orthodox strategy. Levy, however, concludes that “the myth of easy independent selectivity from among the social structures of highly modernized societies must be recognized for what it is and has always been – a hybrid of wishful thinking and sentimental piety.” Modernity exercises an “explosive subversion” of tradition.⁵⁴ (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), cited in Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility, 180–81. Those who chose to avoid any accommodation to secular society had an alternative logic on their side. The strategic issue that divided followers of Samson Raphael Hirsch from those of Rabbi Sofer still divides sociologists.

footnotes: ⁵⁴ Marion J. Levy, Modernization and the Structures of Societies

We have seen how two issues – history and culture, or the direction and scope of covenantal continuity – led to deep differences of opinion within the Orthodox world. Lines were drawn and redrawn. Positions held by one group were sometimes reversed by its own next generation. Orthodoxy was highly reactive to the movements of modern Jewish history, but in each case a delicate issue of judgement was involved. Did the process enhance or threaten the life of Torah? An unequivocal answer was rarely available, for it depended on historical assessment, sociological insight, and a bold interpretation of the rabbinic heritage.

But differences of opinion are not new to Judaism. The Mishnah celebrated what it called “argument for the sake of heaven.”⁵⁵ One impact of modernity on Orthodoxy therefore remains to be considered. What led from difference and division to fragmentation? What led from a tradition that embraced internal dialogue and argument to one that has come to be characterized by fission and mutual delegitimation? What led, in short, to adjectival Orthodoxy?

footnotes: ⁵⁵ Mish. Avot 5:20.